Brush Local News

BEST: Brush School District cannot sell local bonds

District will be required to participate in state lease-purchase plan, board hears

By Jenni Grubbs

Times Staff Writer

Posted:
08/09/2017 05:44:53 PM MDT

Updated:
08/10/2017 11:11:22 PM MDT

Brush School Board President Warren Walker, right, listens to Superintendent Bill Wilson share some information with the board during Tuesday night's meeting at the school district office in Brush. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Brush School District Superintendent Bill Wilson had some unfortunate news for the school board Tuesday night: State officials will not allow the school district to sell local bonds toward the BEST grant match after all.

"One of the things that we requested from BEST was a variance that would have allowed us to sell our own bonds as opposed to being part of the lease-purchase," he said. "At the July meeting, everything looked favorable."

But no action on the request was taken at that time by the state's Public School Capital Construction Assistance Board, which governs BEST, and the issue was tabled.

By August, the BEST officials changed their minds, Wilson said, and Brush School District would be required to participate in the state lease-purchase plan for the bonds being sold.

That decision means that the local school district will not benefit from the premiums from bonds being sold, the superintendent said. Also, it likely means local folks would end up competing to buy the bonds from a much larger pool of buyers.

"It doesn't allow our local constituents to buy those bonds as readily had they wanted to," Wilson said.

School Board member Dianne Cox thought that would be met with disappointment around Brush.

"They usually do" buy such school bonds, she said. "There's a big interest in that."

The plan for the revenue from the selling of bonds that voters approved last November calls for a new middle school and high school complex to be built where the high school is now and incorporating and renovating portions of the existing high school building.

Advertisement

The BEST grant will pay for $27.6 million of the construction costs, with bonds being sold toward the local match and other voter-approved projects. Those projects include getting classrooms up to modern standards, improving security, health and safety aspects of the old building and demolishing the old middle school and parts of the current high school.

The news about the bonds does not mean any delays to building the new middle school/high school campus, though, the superintendent said.

But there will be some extra steps involved now since there will not be any extra local funding from bond premiums to add things to the project, Wilson said.

"It just makes life a little more difficult," he said. "We have to ask for special permission if we do anything beyond soft costs."

That does not mean extra things will not be allowed, but it does make it more complicated for that to happen, Wilson explained, since the school district will need to get permission from BEST before it would get reimbursed from the state.

"We had this win-win-win, and now it's just a win-win," Wilson said. "There's a couple of wins in there. Overall, it's still a win, so we like it."

And overall, "everything's right on track" with plans for building a new middle school/high school campus in Brush, he said.

"We're ready to continue on," he said of a meeting he had earlier Tuesday with the design and development team for the school campus, which will be expected to serve the Brush community for 50 years once it is completed.

Still, he acknowledged that the news was "frustrating," but the school district now needed to "control what you control, and you keep moving."

Wilson pointed out that the school district was "in the process of receiving $28 million of BEST monies, to which we should be thankful and are, and so on we go."

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.